Today’s photos come from Heather Gallagher, who lives in Devon, Pennsylvania (outside of Philadelphia) on a beautiful 6-1/2-acre plot that she bought a year and a half ago. Heather says that she is a novice gardener, but she has joined the local garden club and is learning how to maintain and expand the garden within her aesthetic.
The garden has a lot of history. The original stone house is believed to have been built in 1748, and many gardeners and farmers lived there and put the garden to different use. The people who owned the garden before Heather bought it in 1975 and found it in need of a lot of love and restoration. Heather is learning to keep embracing what makes the garden so beautiful, while dealing with new challenges such as the ever-increasing local deer herds that like to make a snack of many of the plants in the garden.
In winter the garden is still a magical place, with wild vines promising color and magic once warmer weather arrives.
One of the great things about an old garden is the way plants grow up and around the structures, making them feel like a timeless part of the landscape.
A birdhouse is ready for when nesting season arrives.
And this is what the garden looks like in spring! Trees are just coming into leaf, and flowering shrubs are everywhere.
The view down to the swimming pool in early spring. What a magical space! This looks like a garden where the gardeners actually take the time to enjoy the place they have.
A path winds through the garden, lined with perennials and shrubs in all their spring glory.
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Comments
Congrats, Heather, on your fairly new home and property purchase. With over six acres, you are certainly going to be in for years of discovery and gardening adventure. It looks like you have some wonderfully mature flowering spring shrubs and charming vignettes in great abundance to inspire and motivate you. Best of luck and keep the pictures coming.
Amazing! What a treasure to live in!
Your winter pictures give us a wonderful feel for the 'bones' of your new garden, and heighten our appetite to see more spring and summer photos. What a wonderful canvas you have, and kudos to you for involving yourself with a group of experienced gardeners to help you learn. Please send more pictures as you try new things!
It's so exciting to know that a new homeowner has hopes to restore and improve an established garden. Many are overwhelmed and first instinct is to simplify for least maintenance effort. I know you are blessed to live in an area where you can lots of input from enthusiastic gardeners. Besides your local garden club, there's a really embracing group of passionate gardeners … the Hardy Plant Society - Mid Atlantic Group which I recommend. And not far from you is Chanticleer and Scott Arboretum, both great destinations for inspiration.
Any of you who live close enough to Chanticleer for easy visiting have such an amazing resource for inspiration and seeing gardening at its highest level.
I love that outdoor garden room! I saved it to my Pinterest files!
What a wondrous place you have to live and garden in. Enjoy!
How lucky that garden is to have a new owner interested in taking care of it. All too often new owners of properties with wonderful established gardens are just looking at the house and have no interest in maintaining the garden. Either because of ignorance on their part ("Oh, these are perennials and will take care of themselves") or a perceived lack of time to deal with it ("I just don't have the time that all this will take so I will just scale back things and put a lot of it back to lawn). When a garden finds a new caretaker that endeavors to take care of and enhance what is already there it is lucky indeed. You are extremely lucky as well since you have many years to enjoy what is already established and learn to take care of it and add to the beauty that already exists.
This garden looks extremely beautiful with its history, I would like to have a walk there. A few days ago, I found a book in my house, no one knew whose it was. Later it turned out that this is a manuscript that my grandfather found as a child. Since then I have been reading a lot and looking for archives on the Internet to understand who the author might be. I found a service like this https://samplius.com/free-essay-examples/history/, where there are many posts about history and researches, but it is difficult for an ordinary person to do it alone. But thanks to these free essay examples, I found the motivation in myself to learn the story behind this book. I think that my grandfather will be happy with such a find once.
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